| A software
program
or script available through the Internet that
searches various types of documents for keywords; and if found, returns
the documents containing those keywords.
Today there are thousands of different search engines available on
the Internet. However, the first search engine ever developed was
Archie, which was used to search for
FTP files. The first text-based search engine is
Veronica. Because large search engines contain
millions and sometimes billions of pages, many search engines not only just search the pages
but also display the results depending upon their importance. This
importance is commonly determined by using various algorithms.
| To the right is an image example of
how a search engine works. As can be seen in the image the
starting point of all search engines is a spider or crawler,
which visits the pages that will be included in the search and
grabs the contents of each of those pages. Once a page has been
crawled the data contained within the page is processed, often
this involves stripping out stop words, grabbing the location of
each of the words in the page, the frequency they occur, links to
other pages, images, etc. This data is used to rank the page and
grab and is the primary data the search engine uses to
determine if a page should be shown or not when a user is
searching for something.
Finally, once the data has been processed it is often broken up
into one or more files, moved to different computers or servers, or
loaded into memory where it can be accessed when users perform a
search. |
 |
- Additional information about adding a search engine to your
own web site can be found on
document CH000077.
- Additional information on search
engines and how to find information on the Internet can be found
on document CH000082.
- A listing of Internet search
engines can be found on our
links
search section.
Also see: Google, Internet,
Index, Metacrawler,
PageRank,
Search,
SEO, SERP, Stop words,
Veronica,
WAIS, Yahoo
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| Resolved |
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